Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles

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The authors had been opposed to any potential governmental involvement in the reprinting of the book in case it left their work “open to political influence”. The intention was to do good so the idea that people are making money out of our book is horrendous to us. The effect is overwhelming, which is why it took me so long to finish--I could generally only read 2-3 pages at a sitting. Some accounts are fairly brief but most go into enough detail to really give you a good overview of that particular incident.

By attempting historical objectivity, I mean aiming for the very thing David McKittrick describes so elegantly in the above excerpt from his introduction to Lost Lives. It is the story of Northern Ireland troubles told as never before; it is not concerned with the political bickering buth with the lives of those who have suffered and deaths which have resulted from more than three decades of conflict. Through its instrumentation and arrangement, this beautifully haunting body of work is one handled with delicacy and aptly represents a period of recent history in its own right. You are very welcome to quote up to 100 words from any article posted on Vulpes Libris - as long as you quote accurately, give us due credit and link back to the original post.Records were scant and in the worst days of the Troubles, newspapers hadn't been able to keep up with the death toll - some killings were mentioned briefly, then forgotten in the next wave of violence. Sadly, even today, many actors in this debate believe in a ‘hierarchy of victims’ – whereby those killed by Republicans are deserving of most sympathy, while dead Republicans ‘deserved it’… having acted out of some carefully calculated rationale of destruction. As the car began to drive away the same soldier aimed his automatic weapon at it but this time several people told him not to fire and he didn't. The authors didn't have a direct say on which of their stories would be included, but when they saw a rough cut of the movie they were satisfied. And go on and on it did, piling senseless killing on pointless slaughter, in a danse macabre that should, perhaps, have found some memorial amid the festivities of the past weekend.

The information detailed includes the name, date of death, location, profession, religion, age and marital status, together with a brief summary of the circumstances of each death. The deaths chosen for inclusion in the film are broadly representative of the ratio of deaths of Irish republicans, Loyalist paramilitaries and forces of the British state. We spent weeks poring over books and old newspapers, and tapping the information into a computer: names and ages and personal details of people, some of whom were the parents or brothers or sisters of our colleagues and friends working beside us.Fine Gael Minister Colm Brophy last week suggested a project to make the book available could involve a "collaborative effort" with the Northern Ireland Executive. In January 2021 that the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland received the archive relating to the book consisting of “265 folders of mainly newspaper cuttings relating to most of those individuals who died as a result of conflict”. She fills her days with swimming, fishing, quilting, and baiting the tourists who arrive from the city with more money than sense. I would be interested in hearing recommendations from anyone more intimately familiar with the troubles than I, in fact.